That's a fair, reasoned approach, I'll readily admit. I guess we simply disagree on the details and necessity.
I find this happening a lot on this comm. Maybe I should go take a page from Steve_Poticen(sp?) and go batshit loony on the left. None the less, I'll admit that as I age I become more libertarian-ish. Unfortunately I stand just a little too far on the "government can be good if well regulated" crowd.
You're also conflating correlation/causation. Vehicles are safer today largely because technology progresses. We have impact zones, etc. In fact, one of the top institutions in this field is the freaking insurance institute! People don't advertise that their cars meet government standards, people advertise that they get 5 stars on this, or an A rating from that.
I think this is the general problem with these arguments. Libertarians claim that such and such would have happened without regulation, while Dems/Repubs will argue that government intervention in (insert pet project) was necessary for the betterment of society. I do agree that market forces impact for the better certain things. (I.e. selling a safer, better, more durable product comes from a sort of proto-anarchy of supply/demand) HOWEVER!!!!1!eleventy!! When the final responsibility of corporations is to it's shareholders (who don't necessarily like the excuse of "Hey, we lost a few dollars a share this year because of XYZ social project, or XYZ environmental project) rather than the final responsibility of government is to it's people. (You can be cynical if you want about this, but as we saw in 2006/2008/2010 we saw a pretty hefty example of throwing out the bums.)
Plenty of people do, actually. In fact going to other countries for their lower-cost health care (Mexico and India) has become a sort of "thing".
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing IMO. I think that if enough people started doing this, eventually the American medical markets would start trying to drive prices down. Unfortunately I don't see this happening, so for now I'll trust the more expensive, more regulated American medical community.
(1) you think these things wouldn't come about naturally
I don't, at all. You have to remember the situations that precipitated the creation of these things. 80-100 hour work weeks, 10 years olds sacrificing their educations to work in coal mines, extremely unsafe working conditions, and employers that gladly would toss their entire workforce in the trash because they could easily find more cheap labor. (Don't try to tell me that w/o regulation there aren't enough desperate people who would take $4/hr right now to take such a job.) Again, as long as the people in charge were willing to exploit their workers, they continued to do so. I don't see that not being the case.
It's the same thing with pollution regulation. Disallowing >100ppm in your exhaust allows 100ppm in your exhaust. So we can have as many factories as long as they only spew 100ppm or below. And, in fact, you can spew that pollution out at little to no cost to you. Regulation, at least in the pollution field, often reduces the cost of pollution as much as it increases it.
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting here. You're making a point that we can have 100 factories spewing out 100ppm each (or 10,000ppm) or we can have one factory spewing out 10,000ppm and it's essentially the same result? If that IS what you're saying, that's very bizarre. It's a lot easier to have 1 factory spewing out 10,000ppm than it is to have 100 factories spewing 100ppm. Worse yet, you could have 100 factories putting out 10,000.....maybe I'm just misunderstanding you?
Either way, allowing 100ppm in your exhaust is yes, arbitrary, but we have to start somewhere. For better or for worse we do this with all of our laws. We start from some point that makes sense (or not, some would say) and we go from there.
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Date: 20/7/11 02:03 (UTC)That's a fair, reasoned approach, I'll readily admit. I guess we simply disagree on the details and necessity.
I find this happening a lot on this comm. Maybe I should go take a page from Steve_Poticen(sp?) and go batshit loony on the left. None the less, I'll admit that as I age I become more libertarian-ish. Unfortunately I stand just a little too far on the "government can be good if well regulated" crowd.
You're also conflating correlation/causation. Vehicles are safer today largely because technology progresses. We have impact zones, etc. In fact, one of the top institutions in this field is the freaking insurance institute! People don't advertise that their cars meet government standards, people advertise that they get 5 stars on this, or an A rating from that.
I think this is the general problem with these arguments. Libertarians claim that such and such would have happened without regulation, while Dems/Repubs will argue that government intervention in (insert pet project) was necessary for the betterment of society. I do agree that market forces impact for the better certain things. (I.e. selling a safer, better, more durable product comes from a sort of proto-anarchy of supply/demand) HOWEVER!!!!1!eleventy!! When the final responsibility of corporations is to it's shareholders (who don't necessarily like the excuse of "Hey, we lost a few dollars a share this year because of XYZ social project, or XYZ environmental project) rather than the final responsibility of government is to it's people. (You can be cynical if you want about this, but as we saw in 2006/2008/2010 we saw a pretty hefty example of throwing out the bums.)
Plenty of people do, actually. In fact going to other countries for their lower-cost health care (Mexico and India) has become a sort of "thing".
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing IMO. I think that if enough people started doing this, eventually the American medical markets would start trying to drive prices down. Unfortunately I don't see this happening, so for now I'll trust the more expensive, more regulated American medical community.
(1) you think these things wouldn't come about naturally
I don't, at all. You have to remember the situations that precipitated the creation of these things. 80-100 hour work weeks, 10 years olds sacrificing their educations to work in coal mines, extremely unsafe working conditions, and employers that gladly would toss their entire workforce in the trash because they could easily find more cheap labor. (Don't try to tell me that w/o regulation there aren't enough desperate people who would take $4/hr right now to take such a job.) Again, as long as the people in charge were willing to exploit their workers, they continued to do so. I don't see that not being the case.
It's the same thing with pollution regulation. Disallowing >100ppm in your exhaust allows 100ppm in your exhaust. So we can have as many factories as long as they only spew 100ppm or below. And, in fact, you can spew that pollution out at little to no cost to you. Regulation, at least in the pollution field, often reduces the cost of pollution as much as it increases it.
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting here. You're making a point that we can have 100 factories spewing out 100ppm each (or 10,000ppm) or we can have one factory spewing out 10,000ppm and it's essentially the same result? If that IS what you're saying, that's very bizarre. It's a lot easier to have 1 factory spewing out 10,000ppm than it is to have 100 factories spewing 100ppm. Worse yet, you could have 100 factories putting out 10,000.....maybe I'm just misunderstanding you?
Either way, allowing 100ppm in your exhaust is yes, arbitrary, but we have to start somewhere. For better or for worse we do this with all of our laws. We start from some point that makes sense (or not, some would say) and we go from there.